In 1994, writer Kurt Busiek and artist Alex Ross produced the four-issue comic miniseries “Marvels,” which paid tribute to the Marvel Comics they grew up with, most of them from the 1960s, and drew the conclusion that the death of Spider-Man’s blonde ingenue girlfriend, Gwen Stacy, marked the end of innocence for that era.

I’m telling you this because Quentin Tarantino, lifelong nostalgiac for low-born pop culture that he is, has made his own “Marvels.”

Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in … Hollywood” pays tribute to the TV shows and movies he grew up with, most of them from the 1960s, and draws the conclusion that the death of real-life blonde ingenue actress Sharon Tate, who was murdered by members of Charlie Manson’s “family,” marked the end of innocence for that era.

Busiek turns 59 years old this fall, while Tarantino turned 56 this spring, with just enough years between them to put them on opposite sides of the Baby Boomer/Generation X divide, but Busiek was just shy of 44 when “Marvels” was published, the same age that “Once Upon a Time in … Hollywood” star Leonardo DiCaprio is now.

In their fixations with nostalgia, both works are about the anxieties of aging men, who as they grow old, grow afraid of how the world is changing from what they once found familiar.

DiCaprio plays B-level action actor Rick Dalton, while Brad Pitt joins him as his stunt double and enthusiastic enabler, Cliff Booth. But the two characters are simply the two sides of Tarantino himself, with Rick as the career-minded auteur who genuinely cares about his craft, albeit in his own workmanlike way, while Cliff is the unrepentant id-monster who freely indulges his fetishes and doesn’t care about much beyond getting laid and getting paid.

Taken together, the chain-smoking, hard-drinking duo represent Old Hollywood, with their openly voiced disdain for “hippies” and “Mexicans,” and it’s easy to imagine Tarantino creating them as a deliberate rebuke to more “woke” modern sensibilities, especially given Cliff’s acutely unsavory traits.

Like his fellow dialogue-smith David Mamet, Tarantino is a veritable poet laureate of aggressive machismo, and Cliff’s character seems calculated to offend what Tarantino would sneeringly refer to as “political correctness.”

We’re treated to flashbacks that heavily imply Cliff killed his wife for being a nagging harridan (under circumstances that unpleasantly recall real-life actress Natalie Wood’s suspicious drowning) and to a fight scene that improbably shows Cliff laying the smack-down on Bruce Lee (whose mannerisms are captured pitch-perfectly, if a bit cruelly, by Mike Moh).

And this is where Tarantino comes closest to emulating Martin Scorsese, another great American director with an affinity for history’s losers.

Just as Scorsese artificially bolstered the achievements and prestige of real-life boxer Jake LaMotta in “Raging Bull,” and real-life gangster Henry Hill in “Goodfellas,” so too does Tarantino allow Rick Dalton, whom DiCaprio portrays as possessing the diligent but limited acting talent of a Troy Donahue at best, to score some underdog wins, both professionally and personally.

Even as Tarantino builds Cliff up as a tough guy to a slightly insufferable degree, he allows Rick some surprising moments of vulnerability with an unnervingly precocious child actor on the set of one of his Westerns.

Tarantino falls firmly on the side of subtext being for cowards, so when Rick starts recounting the plot of a paperback he’s reading, about a bronco buster whose age is catching up with him, it’s clearly a reflection of his own character arc, but DiCaprio’s subsequent breakdown into tears, and the comfort he receives from the child actor he’s costarring with (played with astonishing maturity and authenticity by 10-year-old Julia Butters) makes it impossible not to feel for him.

If there is a common thread that binds Rick and Sharon Tate (played by Margot Robbie), who happens to be his next-door neighbor in this fictional version of history, it’s that you want to see them both succeed as A-level Hollywood stars at last, especially after Robbie’s Tate sneaks into a screening of her film, “The Wrecking Crew,” and quietly thrills to the positive reception her character receives from the audience.

It’s the moment when Tarantino comes closest to recreating the wonder that Gwen Stacy expressed in “Marvels,” toward the heightened sensation of living in a world populated by superheroes — “It’s like being in a snow globe, so pretty and strange and unreal, as if it’s not happening now, it’s only a dream of something that happened once” — because you not only share in her joy, but lament the loss of who she could have become.

That being said, if there’s one thing that separates Quentin Tarantino from Kurt Busiek, it’s that Busiek never would have thought to revise the sacred texts of those old Marvel Comics, whereas the crashing finale of “Inglourious Basterds” made clear long ago how much fidelity Tarantino feels toward historical fact.

So yes, while this film’s denouement makes the conclusion of Scorsese’s “King of Comedy,” and the fate of Robert De Niro’s Rupert Pupkin, feel realistic and restrained by comparison, it’s hard to begrudge Tarantino his wish to “Quantum Leap” into the past, because when a film’s title starts with the words “Once Upon a Time,” it’s not like it didn’t warn you it was a fairytale.

While Tarantino’s reflexive need to posture as an anti-PC “man’s man” can be a bit wearying, he’s produced something kind of beautiful and uplifting almost in spite of himself, with a verisimilitude to the types of grainy filmed, stock genre TV shows and movies that any fan of classic Hollywood will want to bask in, like a lazy lizard soaking up the warmth of the sun.

Next time, though, Quentin, maybe cool it with the foot-fetish shots of your actresses’ bare feet?